A journey in words...

Welcome to my journey in words! A story about health, exercise, weight loss, food addiction, humor, size discrimination, sarcasm, social commentary and all the rest that’s rattling around inside my head...

I now twit, er... or tweet. Anyway, you can follow me on twitter @Aeon1202

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Beat Down

I didn’t fully realize until recently how badly the culture we live in has beaten down not just me – but the people around me as well. On so many occasions of late, I’ve had a smart, attractive, funny, well loved person turn to me and admit that their self esteem is terrible.

And I, genius that I am, can only stare at them mystified and ask; “why?”

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about our world that instills such a poor sense of self worth in so many truly worthwhile people.

Why are we so hard on ourselves?

There’s the obvious reasons of course; if you’re a woman (and to a lesser degree this is true for men as well) the advertising and Hollywood industry holds up standards of eternal youth and beauty in front of our faces that we normal folk cannot possibly hope to achieve.

For example; I occasionally watch a clothing design show called Project Runway that’s hosted by the gorgeous Heidi Klum. She noted to one designer that his outfit had aged his early-twenty-something model by about ten years. She followed this up with saying “and model years are like dog years.”

Heidi herself, despite still being outrageously beautiful, is now too old to be a model – that’s why she’s moved on to hosting reality TV shows.

However I don’t think this is the whole picture… most of us look at movie and print ad images and sort of blow them off. I know I do. It’s like those people aren’t even real. And honestly, they’re not real these days. Go to You Tube and type in “photoshop makeover” and you’ll find hundreds of hits of people taking photographs of fat or in other ways unfortunate looking people and turning them into identical little model cut out dolls.

Even models aren’t beautiful enough to be models anymore – see the attached article and the photo that Ralph Lauren doctored of their ‘too fat’ model if you’d like proof:

Honestly – is this even attractive to anyone? The photo they doctored of this girl makes her look like some kind of bizarre Close Encounters space alien. What world are these people living in, anyway? Do they even know what men find attractive? Women who look like teenaged boys is not it, I can tell you that with pretty good certainty. It’s called BOOBS – look them up.

So if the fashion industry is just a joke at this point; why do so many people still feel so bad about themselves?

Is it Hollywood? The Hollywood ideal isn’t like the fashion industry’s ideal. In Hollywood women are supposed to look like women, not young boys. As thin and muscular as possible with huge eyes and lips and huge boobs is I think the perfection they’re looking for. But are any of us even trying to attain that? I mean – how can we? I have nice enough eyes, but they’re pretty small and there isn’t any way for me to make them bigger. I pretty much gave up on trying to look like a movie star since… well, lets be honest – I’ve never had any illusions about looking like a movie star.

I really don’t know where this is coming from, I wish I did – because then I could more effectively reason with the bruised souls around me. Then again, I’m sure they share my frustration as they try to ease my bruises as well.

As a side note; I just noticed that I’ve lost enough weight that the Daily Plate has recalculated my recommended calorie intake for a two pound per week weight loss. I went from a top number of 2,050 to 1,990 or so. Although I’ve set my own goal of roughly 1,500 per day, it’s kind of cool to see that little bit of progress in my tracking system.

1 comment:

You'll be amazed at how far you've come after the destination of the Long Road has been reached.If you decided to go to GenCon by walking a mile a day...it wouldn't feel as though you'd ever get there. But the truth is every mile would be a mile closer to your goal. It would just take a long time to get there. But at the end of the journey you'd look back at all those days and all those miles and see the whole journey.